WHY?
No easy answers for motive behind mass shootings; some fear ‘contagion’
The devastation keeps coming — 26 slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., 49 gunned down in Orlando, 58 slain in Las Vegas.
Over about five years, six mass shootings in the USA each took the lives of 12 or more people, and since the start of 2017, at least 119 people died in such shootings, according to USA TODAY research.
Overall, mass shootings have increased in frequency and deadliness according to a Mother Jones database that focuses on public attacks in which the motive appeared to be an indiscriminate killing. The Mother Jones data show some sharp spikes and plummets — a “zigzag,” says Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo, a criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven. Overall, there is a rise, which she calls “puzzling ” as violence in general trends downward.
There is no single, obvious reason for the increase, she says, but “you can’t escape the conclusion that accessibility of weapons of essentially mass destruction defi- nitely makes a contribution.”
David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard’s Department of Health Policy and Management, also points to firearms. “Our guns are becoming more and more lethal and more militarized,” he says. “It’s now so much easier to kill large numbers of people.”
He sees mass shootings as “a contagion.”
“I think certain crime is contagious,” he says. As mass shootings become more publicized and normalized, they become “an option” that a perpetrator perhaps wouldn’t have thought
“It’s now so much easier to kill large numbers of people.” David Hemenway, Harvard’s Department of Health Policy and Management
of previously.
Some shooters want to create a legacy, says forensic psychiatrist Steven Pitt, an adviser to the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office on the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 in Colorado. “There is the sick mentality as to who can be the biggest and the best or who can go down as committing the biggest number of murders,” Pitt says.
Non-stop news coverage and social media posts about these shootings could encourage “disaffected individuals to engage in similar copycat offenses,” he says.
Tcherni-Buzzeo has a similar theory: “The next person wants to one-up the previous one.”
Pitt stresses that “it’s overly simplistic to simply say one size fits all when it comes to these types of mass shootings. We know that different mass shooters have different ideologies.”
Some want to make a political statement, he says. Others may be disgruntled office workers, have paranoid delusions or have been dumped by a significant other.
“You are talking about individuals and individual behavioral choices,” he says.
Though some statistics point to a rise in mass shooting frequency and deadliness, Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox says there is no clear evidence, especially since there is a lack of consistent benchmarks and no common definition of a mass shooting used by those gathering statistics. “Some years are worse than others — it swings up and down for no real reason,” says Fox, who is on the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.
He contends that mass shootings have not increased but that there is one thing definitely on the rise: fear. The preponderance of information on social media and TV “gives you the impression that things are worse,” he says.